Order of Experience in Charlotte Smith's Sonnets Mack Hammond College

Through her series of celebrated published sonnets, Charlotte Smith has provided readers and critics with useful insights into the life and experiences of an 18th century woman whose life events met her with a great number of detriments. Her self-described melancholic state through which she mourns a lost happiness often stands as a focus of her writing. Literary critic and professor Adela Pinch closely observes Smith’s sonnets in her piece Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. She takes an in depth look at Smith’s references to other poets, and poses the notion that the acts of reading and writing precede Smith’s feelings – essentially causing them. While this idea is original and thought provoking, it is not wholly the case. Through close reading of Smith’s Sonnet I and Sonnet XII, we see that the acts of literary reading and writing influence, rather than plainly precede, Smith’s feelings and emotions.

Sonnet I presents itself as a great starting point for observing Smith’s understanding of her own melancholy in relation to poetry. She is quick to point to the idea that her sympathetic abilities, essential to reading and writing poetry, leave her less happy than those who go without. She writes...